A little humor at my expense...

I decided this morning that some of my breathing trouble may be because I'm allergic to dust and my room hasn't been really cleaned in years. I'm mean, its been cleaned, but not really cleaned and the cleaning woman was coming about 30 min after I got out of bed.

So I empty out under my bed. Then decide I'm going to take apart my PC, get rid of all the cables, and amps and Xboxes and speakers so that everything can be vacuumed and dusted. So the cleaning woman gets in all the nooks in crannies and now I've got a clean room, but then I realize that last time I used the vacuum I turned the suction all the way down as I was fluffing my mattress pad.

So...I ask her if she can do it again. At this point I'm so grateful that I decide I'm going to give her the old camera I was going to sell to buy a new one (probably worth between $25 and $50) and I scrounge around and find all my old SD cards to include with it. Then I realize that this camera ate batteries like no bodies business and this woman is going to spend a fortune in batteries (and here I am trying to help her). So I take the rechargables out of my Xbox controllers and give her my $20 rechargeable kit.

So far, so good...I'm feeling pretty good about helping her out and figure I can do without an old camera and get new rechargables. Tonight I go to put everything back together and dig through the box of transformers until I find a charger that fits my hub. I glance at it and it says 12v. I know USB hubs use 5V, but I'm like, 10 ports, it must take more power. I plug the hub in, then plug my mouse and keyboard in and get nothing. Then I try the mouse in another PC...its dead. Not sure how (yet), but somehow killed a $50 mouse.

I decide to just leave everything for a bit and watch some TV. Then all of a sudden it hits me, USB hubs aren't wired in serial, there's no reason it would take more than 5v. So I run back upstairs as I've still got my obscenely priced keyboard (don't even ask how much) plugged into to it. Luckily, the keyboard lives (somehow). But the $30 hub and $50 mouse are dead. All I can figure with the keyboard is paying as much as I did gives you voltage regulating capacitors.

So in all, cleaning the room cost me a $30 hub, a $50 mouse (the replacement costs for these items), an old camera and SD cards, and my $20 battery charging kit. Oh, and then I realized that with all the picking up, I forgot to put my eye mask in a drawer (I can't close my eyes completely), so that'll be another $10 and a probably a nights sleep.

Not real happy with myself at the moment. <sigh> At least my mechanical keyboard still works. Well, I guess everyone makes mistakes.